Search This Blog

How many young people leave school without any qualification?

Head of the Innovation and Measuring Progress division, Directorate for Education and Skills

More education yields better job prospects and higher average levels of income, and is also associated with better (self-reported) health, social capital and political engagement. Year after year Education at a Glance provides the evidence that links educational attainment to these various economic and social outcomes. The economic crisis has underlined the relevance of such findings. The social cost of the crisis, in terms of unemployment and poverty, has been particularly high for those who lacked the risk insurance that education seems to guarantee for the highly educated.

The latest unemployment data from the OECD (November 2014) show that unemployment rates remain virtually unchanged at very high levels and that there is little prospect for real improvement. The recently published Education at a Glance Interim Report , which includes 2013 data, shows that the relative risk of unemployment among low-educated adults continues to be very high. On average across OECD countries, 13.7% of those without an upper secondary qualification were unemployed, compared to 5.3% for tertiary-educated individuals and 8% among those with upper secondary or post-secondary non-tertiary education.

Countries have every good reason to lift as many young people as possible out of the trap of having to enter the labour market and adulthood without a good qualification. Indeed, many countries have identified the problem of early, unqualified school leavers as a major educational challenge. One just has to glance at the chart above to understand how big the problem is. On average across OECD countries with available data, 16.8% of 25-34 year-olds have to start life without a minimum level qualification. At least one in six young people in 13 OECD countries – including Denmark, France, Italy, the Netherlands, New Zealand and Norway – lacks qualifications. This is a major risk for these labour markets and societies.

Many countries have expanded their tertiary education systems and have seen the share of tertiary-educated individuals in the 25-34 year-old cohort grow year after year – but the share of low-educated youth does not diminish at an equivalent rate. Between 2005 and 2013, the average annual growth rate in the share of tertiary-educated youth was almost twice as high as the rate of decline in the share of young people who did not have an upper secondary qualification: .94 percentage points compared to .50 percentage points. This also means that the relative share of mid-educated 25-34 year-olds has decreased as well, by .46 percentage points per year, on average.

Some countries have both a large share of highly educated youth and a large share of low-educated youth. In Spain, for example, 41.1% of 25-34 year-olds are tertiary educated and 34.9% of individuals that age do not have an upper secondary qualification. Austria, the Czech Republic, the Slovak Republic and Slovenia have the opposite profile, with small proportions of low-educated youth, a large share of young people with an upper secondary qualification, and a comparatively small proportion of tertiary-educated youth.

Sure, there is progress: the group of young people without any qualification grows smaller year after year; but progress is slow and unevenly distributed among countries. In Greece, Luxembourg, Portugal, Turkey and the United Kingdom, the share of young people without any qualification decreased by an average of more than 1.2 percentage points between 2005 and 2013. But in Denmark, Estonia, Norway and Switzerland, the share of young people in the workforce who had no qualification increased during the same period.

The message is clear: if countries want to achieve sustainable and inclusive economic growth and social progress, they should not only expand their tertiary education systems, they should also work to reduce the share of low-educated youth. Leaving a large share of young adults behind without any educational protection against the risks of unemployment, insecure jobs and social exclusion might, in the end, eat into most of the growth dividend acquired through higher educational attainment. Progress has to be achieved across the educational spectrum.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

by Dirk Van DammeHead of the Innovation and Measuring Progress Division, Directorate for Education and Skills

The label “21st -century skills” is being increasingly used, and sometimes misused, to indicate that the rapidly changing economic, social and cultural environment of the current century demands a revision of what we think are crucial subjects for the next generations to learn. Examples include creativity, innovation, critical thinking, curiosity, collaboration, cross-cultural understanding or global competence. Some people wonder whether these skills are truly new, or whether education has always been about fostering these capabilities. But stakeholders – not least employers and the business sector – continue to complain that they don’t find candidates leaving the education systems who have the skills they think matter for the jobs they have to offer. And they claim that this is the case because current education systems do not sufficiently prioritise the development of such…

In 2015, 193 countries committed to achieving the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of the United Nations, a shared vision of humanity that provides the missing piece of the globalisation puzzle. The extent to which that vision becomes a reality will in no small way depend on what is happening in today’s classrooms. Indeed, it is educators who hold the key to ensuring that the SDGs become a real social contract with citizens.

Goal 4, which commits to quality education for all, is intentionally not limited to foundation knowledge and skills, such as literacy, mathematics and science, but emphasises learning to live together sustainably. This has inspired the OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), the global yardstick for success in education, to include global competence in its metrics for quality, equity and effectiveness in education. PISA will assess global competence for the first time ev…

by Andreas SchleicherDirector, OECD Directorate for Education and Skills

Globalisation is connecting people, cities, countries and continents, bringing together a majority of the world’s population in ways that vastly increase our individual and collective potential, and creating an integrated market in products and services. One in three jobs in the business sector now depends on demand in other countries. In fact, a single product is often produced by workers in different parts of the world along the so-called Global Value Chain. Global value chains give small companies and countries unprecedented opportunities to reach global markets and create new jobs.

But the same forces have made the world more volatile, more complex and more uncertain. The rolling processes of outsourcing and the hollowing out of jobs, particularly for routine tasks, have radically altered the nature of work. For those with the advantage of the right knowledge and skills, this is liberating and exciting. In In…